Recently talked to a friend about having a cold and he pushed vitamin C like wildfire. I didn't understand why but then he brought up a friend with terminal cancer who was curing himself with intravenous vitamin C and lived much longer than doctors prescribed.

I hate when people pull this, they cite some anomaly whose details they don;t understand (i.e : what type of cancer, how advanced , what diet the person has or had , what other drugs they are talking)

So I did some reading and apparently the idea comes from Linus Pauling who made a very bias trial where the group that got the vitamin c was very early on in cancer. The Mayo clinic also did a trial-properly this time , no benefit - longest lasting trial patient was on the placebo. Also , for irony's sake , Pauling died of prostate cancer.

I just don't know what to do with these situations. I am so sick of them. People claim some absurd medical treatment works , you research it , find it has no validity but their own emotional opinion and a sample of one (themselves or a friend) takes precedence.

You might try telling him that you're only interested in science-based medicine. Anecdotal stories aren't evidence of effectiveness. You want to stick with medicine or treatments that controlled studies have shown to be effective. Ask him to send you the studies on the effectiveness of vitamin C as a cancer treatment.

I would state like Jeff says, you follow scientific based solutions. If they push, I'd choose the battles and leave the rest with an eye roll. Is it worth your effort and time and will it improve your life currently?

(13-02-2012 04:43 PM)Jeff Wrote: You might try telling him that you're only interested in science-based medicine. Anecdotal stories aren't evidence of effectiveness. You want to stick with medicine or treatments that controlled studies have shown to be effective. Ask him to send you the studies on the effectiveness of vitamin C as a cancer treatment.

97% of the medicine sent to the FDA are proven to be less effective than a placebo. With horrifying results like that, Kinda makes you wonder what the margin of error is.... And of course there are the ones that do initially pass and are later to be more harmful than beneficial.

With #s like that I find it hard to put much faith in pharmacology tbh. Sounds like the industry is overrun with an awful lot of snake oil salesmen to me.

Linus Pauling, who won a Nobel Prize used to recommend round 5000-10,000 mg of C. largely to ward off colds.
Problems associated with mega self dosing include false readings from blood tests;also, with large doses of C there is an increased risk of kidney stone.
I think Pauling's theory has been largely dismissed.

(08-03-2012 08:48 PM)robotworld Wrote: Here's a fancy graph depicting various alternative medication and their supposed "effects". Lots of them with weak evidence, some however with strong evidence supporting their claims.

[infographic]

Well this is elucidating.

Now my laziness is warring with my need to see the facts upon which the chart is based.

(08-03-2012 08:48 PM)robotworld Wrote: Here's a fancy graph depicting various alternative medication and their supposed "effects". Lots of them with weak evidence, some however with strong evidence supporting their claims.

[infographic]

Well this is elucidating.

Now my laziness is warring with my need to see the facts upon which the chart is based.

Here's the full Google doc which the infographic is based on. The Google doc provides the name of the herb/supplement, strength of present evidence, source of research (more than one, scroll to the right for more research awesomeness), and even a helpful extract from the papers.